Founded in the mid-eighteenth century as a frontier outpost, the settlement, first known as Dalstonburg, then as Marysville, became the seat of justice when Charlotte County was formed. Still a small village, it is among the handful of Virginia courthouse towns that have preserved a remarkable feeling of earlier times. The public square, where Patrick Henry made his last public address, is surrounded by a cluster of county buildings from various periods, a tavern, a church, and—across the main street now named David Bruce Avenue—law offices and commercial structures. Although a highway widening project in the 1950s necessitated the removal of porches on some of the latter group, little else seems to have changed since the town's nineteenth-century heyday.
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